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Washington (CNSNews.com) – A federal judge will rule Wednesday whether to uphold President Barack Obama’s six-month moratorium on offshore drilling, a response to the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Several oil service companies asked a federal judge on Monday to block the U.S. Interior Department from enforcing a six-month moratorium on new deepwater drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico. The lawsuit filed claims the government arbitrarily imposed the moratorium and suspended drilling at 33 existing exploratory wells without any proof that the operations posed a threat. U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman is scheduled to hear...

Billionaire investor George Soros on Tuesday reported that during the fourth quarter he increased his already considerable stakes in Brazilian state-controlled oil company Petroleo Brasileiro S.A. /quotes/comstock/13*!pbr/quotes/nls/pbr (PBR 38.29, +0.05, +0.13%) and Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!pot/quotes/nls/pot (POT 99.36, -1.25, -1.24%) . Soros, through his Soros Fund Management LLC, reported holding 36.8 million American depositary receipts of the Brazilian oil company known as Petrobras as of Dec. 31 - a holding valued at about $900 million at the time. Soros held 21.2 million ADRs at Sept. 30, according to his disclosure filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Soros...

You read that headline correctly. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is financing oil exploration off Brazil. The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan. The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a "preliminary commitment" letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil...

...Two patterns have emerged during Obama’s presidency: 1) Big business increasingly seeks profits through more government, and 2) Obama nonetheless paints opponents of his intervention as industry shills. BP is just the latest example of this tawdry sleight of hand. Yes they are because all day I couldn’t help but think about Goldmann Sachs and what we witnessed a couple of weeks ago on Capitol Hill, in more Kabuki Theater. There is a reason Glenn Beck did a show not too long ago called “Crime Inc.” on the topic of the Chicago Climate Exchange. The set-up from the powers that...

Energy Policy: President Obama says the oil disaster proves the need to get off fossil fuels. But before we save the planet, let's save the Gulf and stop exploiting crises to deny America the energy it needs. Saving the planet is nice, but just how do we plug the hole again? With an abundance of hand gestures, the president didn't really say in his speech Tuesday night. He did say fossil fuels were bad and green energy is good, but the people of the Gulf states don't need wind turbines right now. Contrary to Obama's assertions, our "addiction" to foreign...

Leadership: FDR said we had nothing to fear but fear itself. JFK asked what we could do for our country. Now we can add Obama's whine about the disaster in the Gulf: "I can't suck it up with a straw." 'Even though I'm president of the United States, my power is not limitless," the president told Grand Isle, La., locals in a video released Friday. "So I can't dive down there and plug the hole. I can't suck it up with a straw. All I can do is make sure that I put honest, hardworking, smart people in place ....

Energy Policy: The advisory board on offshore drilling says it never endorsed a moratorium, which was added later by the interior secretary. The only thing transparent about this administration is its lies. Experts brought together by the Obama administration to review offshore drilling safety were asked to review recommendations in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. They did not give their blessing to the six-month drilling moratorium announced by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and have accused him of deliberately appending their report to make it seem like they did. According to the New Orleans Times Picayune, Salazar's May 27...

A Republican House candidate is calling on President Obama to lift the administration’s six-month moratorium on 33 deepwater rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, saying it will affect thousands of jobs.  Jeff Landry, running in the GOP primary for Louisiana's 3rd Congressional District seat, told HUMAN EVENTS that he’s getting feedback from people involved in the local oil industry that the President’s ban, issued a week ago, is hurting their business. And a shipbuilder told him that he had a $20 million order canceled for three boats.  The Associated Press reported Thursday that it obtained an email from the Minerals...

The Economy: As if the latest measly numbers on our jobless recovery weren't bad enough, along comes the administration to pile disaster upon disaster by slapping a six-month ban on deep-water drilling. When President Obama visited Louisiana on May 1, he talked about the possibility that the oil gushing from BP's Deepwater Horizon well could "jeopardize the livelihoods of thousands of Americans who call this place home." Now the administration's response could jeopardize the livelihoods of tens of thousands more. In a letter sent to Obama on Wednesday, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal challenged the president's decision to suspend deepwater drilling...

No details at WaPo sight yet...just email alert "breaking".

The Minerals Management Service has stopped issuing permits for new oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico regardless of water depth, effectively extending President Obama's previously announced suspension of permits for deepwater drilling into the shallow waters.

Energy Policy: To save the environment, a senator from Pennsylvania wants to shut off a major source of natural gas. Weren't the roads to the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters paved with equally good intentions? Environmentalism did not cause the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, but it did help make it possible, just as 1989's Exxon Valdez disaster, which the Gulf Oil spill has now eclipsed, was also ironically made possible by a desire to protect the environment. The original plan when oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope was to build a pipeline directly to the...

Shell today produced its first oil and natural gas from the Perdido Development, the world’s deepest offshore drilling and production facility. Located in an isolated, ultra-deep sector of the Gulf of Mexico, Perdido marks a new era in innovation and safely unlocks domestic sources of energy for US consumers. The facility sits in approximately 2,450 metres (8,000 feet) of water, which is roughly equivalent to six Empire State Buildings stacked one atop the other, and will access reservoirs deep beneath the ocean floor. Perdido smashes the world water depth record for an offshore platform by more than 50%. “Perdido is...

California GOP gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner on Friday backed away from their party's "drill, baby, drill" mantra in the wake of the devastating BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which is now considered to be the worst oil-related disaster in American history. As President Obama visited the gulf region to respond to criticism about his administration's response to the spill, Whitman and Poizner said in separate appearances on the Peninsula that they have modified their views on offshore drilling in California as a result of the spill, which has gushed 18 million to nearly 40...

The bad news for Drill Baby Drill advocates: the Gulf spill at Deepwater Horizon has forced a rebound for prioritizing environmental concerns over energy needs among Americans. The good news: it hasn’t eliminated majority support for off-shore drilling … yet. The long-term trend over the past three years that finally put energy needs as a higher priority only took a month to reverse after the inability of BP and the Obama administration to stop the massive spill: Between March and today, with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill intervening, Americans’ preferences for prioritizing between environmental protection and energy production have...

White House continues deepwater drilling ban, delays Alaska project By Ben Geman - 05/27/10 10:42 AM ET The White House will continue a ban on new deepwater oil-and-gas drilling permits for six months and will also delay drilling in shallower Arctic waters off Alaska’s coast, administration officials said. President Barack Obama plans to announce tougher offshore safety oversight at a news conference Thursday. The administration is also canceling a planned lease sale in the western Gulf of Mexico and another off Virginia’s coast.

President Obama plans to extend a moratorium on new offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and on the North Slope of Alaska through the end of 2010. The president made the announcement at a midday news conference. After offering support for expanded drilling operations earlier this year as part of his overall energy strategy, Obama is ordering the moratorium in the aftermath of the April 20 oil rig explosion and subsequent blowout of a BP deep-sea well in the gulf. One oil company, Shell, was set to go forward with an exploratory project this summer in the Arctic Ocean.

Here's my question: Why were we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place? Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama's tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land,...

Energy: An administration never enthusiastic about offshore drilling is using the Gulf oil spill as an excuse to suspend Arctic exploration. Who could've seen that coming? Now we'll be more dependent on foreign oil. Suspicions in some quarters that the administration was being deliberately lax in its response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in order to pursue a larger, anti-domestic energy agenda were met with derision. But if not deliberate, the effect is the same as the administration prepares to shut down our search for new oil. President Obama on Thursday announced a suspension...

Regulations: Call it cap-and-trade or bait-and-switch, but John Kerry and Joe Lieberman continue to tilt at windmills with a bill to restrain energy growth in the name of saving the planet.IBD Exclusive Series: American Freedom And Prosperity Under AttackThe bill introduced Wednesday and sponsored by the two senators is called the American Power Act, an Orwellian phrase if ever there was one. Like President Obama's offshore drilling program, for every "incentive" there is a restriction. It's as if Hamlet were to be appointed Secretary of Energy. The legislation has little to do with developing America's vast domestic energy supply. It's...